Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chad Millman
Read between
May 11, 2015 - August 22, 2019
For a while, the Dorsetts outran everyone and everything—their mother, their father, the street, school, the mill, and themselves. Ernie, ten years older than Anthony, used to pull him away from his mother’s hearth and get in his face before he hit elementary school.
“You can’t even play the game. You’re going to be the sorriest Dorsett of them all,” his brother Ernie would say. Anthony steeled himself and committed to proving his worth in the only arena that mattered in Aliquippa, high school football. “I remember the first time I touched the football,” Dorsett recalled.
But striking, in Pittsburgh, while playing football for the Steelers, was complicated. It was a union town, but one whose steelworkers were losing jobs every day. And those people, largely fans of the Steelers, didn’t empathize with the striking players. “They wanted to know why we weren’t being loyal and going to play a game,” says Rocky Bleier. “It wasn’t like we were working eight hours a day and spending forty years in the mill. That’s how fans felt—they didn’t equate sports with work.”
The next day, Dan Rooney called Bleier and gave him a gift: They were going to put him on injured reserve, pay him a salary and let him continue rehabbing so he could try again next year. “I had an internal drive mechanism,” says Bleier. “Everyone likes to be a hero and have someone look up to you. And I just didn’t want to be like everyone else who was working a regular job.”
Even if the players knew what kind of damage steroids caused, they were athletes, in their prime, trying to be the best in the world. The future wasn’t a consideration. “No one on our team ever asked me if I wanted any,” says Russell. “And I’m glad. Because I can’t say I wouldn’t have tried if they did.”
So he calls back, at eleven that night, and he said, ‘Rocky, I called earlier because I was driving around and listening to a radio show and people were complaining about players and their loyalty and especially that Bleier kid and it bothered me. I called to let you know that what I did for you I would have done for any of my boys. If you believe in the strike, you be back in that picket line and we’ll get this thing cleared up. I didn’t want you to worry about what people are saying.’ “How can you not like that guy? It just made me want to play for him even more.”
Against the advice of his fellow owners, Dan Rooney stood before the picketers that August, with Bleier by his side, and told them there would be no hard feelings once all this had been worked out. Their approach compelled players to confide in the Rooneys. After Dan addressed the team, Joe Gilliam, the third-year quarterback, pulled the owner aside and told him, “Mr. Rooney, I have to cross. It’s my only shot to make this team.”
BY THE TIME ANTHONY DORSETT REACHED HIGH SCHOOL IN 1969, Namath was the coolest guy in the world leading a rebel football league’s team to play another homegrown hero—Johnny Unitas—in Super Bowl III. The future and past of professional football, forged in western Pennsylvania, was on national display.
He packed it away with all of the things his brothers and neighbors had said to him. It forged his internal fear and insecurity into a potent cocktail. The more people he proved wrong and shut up, the better he would feel about himself.
When word spread of Dorsett’s child and his decision not to marry his son’s mother, he alienated every steelworker who had ever knocked someone up but did the right thing and married his girl and
then walked into the J&L hiring office. Western PA and working-class tradition always held that a man stepped up when he got a girl pregnant. You were no longer free to do as you pleased. But Dorsett didn’t see it that way. His best opportunity to support the mother and child was to achieve his professional goals—not marry a girl he wasn’t committed to and abandon his God-given gifts to take a job at the steel mill. He wasn’t going to ruin his life to please other people.
Player as storyline.
The limelight, the demands on me, being a part of everything and at the same time apart from everything—all of those things weighed heavily on me .
Recognize!
His showboating did not endear him to his
hometown crowd. Pittsburghers loved to watch him play, but they had no use for his taunting. He’d become bigger than the team, and many resented the way he put himself in the spotlight.
Dorsett gave no credence to the oft-repeated mantra of head coaches from peewee to pro: “There’s no ‘I’ in team.” If it were all team, why was he the lightning rod for media attention?
After Russell introduced himself he remembered, “Lambert staring at me hard, without smiling, shaking my hand with a powerful grip, as though I was the rookie and he was the veteran.”
But in the next game, a 35-35 tie with the Broncos, Gilliam threw the ball fifty times. That was twelve more than the any Steelers quarterback had thrown in the first two games combined the season before. While Gilliam was being hailed as the league’s greatest new gunslinger—he was Sports Illustrated’s cover man after the Colts game—Noll was quietly stewing. Gilliam was most comfortable in chaos, when the game played out like pinball, with the ball careening around at laser speed and him reacting. He had a zest for throwing the ball, and his was as pretty a ball as there was in the NFL.
The player became the story.
He was “Pittsburgh’s Black Quarterback.” The death threats he received weren’t because he was playing badly; they were because he was black and playing badly.
The cycle was always the same: Demand for steel plummeted, the older generation got a big pay raise and the young guys were sent packing until demand came back. They wouldn’t be recalled for months, sometimes even a year.
At least the timing wasn’t bad. Contracts were always up in August, which meant layoffs came in the fall. And that meant tens of thousands of rabid Steelers fans had nothing to do from September to January but loaf in union halls and old-time Pittsburgh joints like Joe Chiodo’s tavern in
Homestead. Chiodo’s was on Main Street, not far from the gates of the Homestead works. The specialty of the house was the “mystery meat sandwich,” which changed daily according to what Chiodo could get cheap in the strip district, Pittsburgh’s wholesale clearinghouse for meat and produce. Hung from the tavern’s rafters was an ancient collection of brassieres, along with a hodgepodge of unique Pittsburgh artifacts.
Between three Dolphins, the Raiders came down with the ball—and the last-second win. Afterward, in the heat of the moment, John Madden said, “When the best plays the best, anything can happen.” Madden wasn’t the only one who acted as if the Super Bowl had just been played.
For most of the game, that wasn’t the case. It was 3-0 Oakland after one, 3-3 at the half and 10-3 Oakland after three quarters. But the Stunt 4-3 was wearing down the Raiders offense, keeping the score close until the Steelers could make a game of it. In the fourth, they finally did. Down a touchdown, Franco Harris ended a nine-play, sixty-one-yard drive with a nine-yard touchdown. On the next series, with the Raiders running game going nowhere, Stabler dropped back to pass and was picked off by Ham, who returned it to the Raiders nine. A Bradshaw to Swann TD pass gave the Steelers the lead
...more
“I think he learned that you can’t make the game bigger than life,” Ham says.
in his mouth, Art Rooney wrapped his hands tightly around the ball. FOURTH QUARTER 1975-1977 37 NOLL DIDN’T CHANGE HIS GRUMPY, PRAGMATIC APPROACH just because the Steelers had won the Super Bowl. “When we opened camp in 1975, the message was, first of all, win the battle of the hitting,” says Greene.
The same things we were doing when we were 1-13 were the same things we were doing in 1975. But with much better players.”
“I give away twenty pounds whenever I step on the field,” Lambert once said. “So I have to be twenty pounds more aggressive.”
“If anyone thought they were going to promote themselves, they would have been beat down so fast and thrown out of the locker room.
Team/game greater than individuals.
Some players were too relaxed to screw with—there was no payoff in their reaction.
The Steelers took over. Franco Harris fell at Russell and Ham’s feet, but Ham kept on talking about coal. Then Bradshaw threw a pick and the linebackers coach put Ham back in the game. He ran onto the field, caused a fumble on the first play, ran back to Russell, took a knee, and picked up the conversation right where he had left off.
Pittsburgh had the ball on its own twenty-two, nearly the length of the field ahead of it. These were the moments that sent Noll into an empty place. For all the reserve and calm and intellect he displayed during practice, his lack of control of the games—the time when he knew it was all up to the players—forced him to actually lose it. Players often heard him muttering to himself.
It was plain old duty. His radio bosses told him to think of a gimmick for the upcoming playoff game with the Colts. “I don’t do gimmicks,” Cope told them. “Your contract is up in three months,” they responded. “I love gimmicks,” said Cope.
Come Sunday, even with a bright northern California sun burning high in the sky, football would be played on a slow, sloppy track. No one ever proved it. But the conspiratorial Davis remained convinced that teams were always looking to retaliate. Teams, for example, like the Steelers.
SUPER BOWLS ARE BUILT ON HYPE. THERE HAS TO BE GLAMOUR. There has to be trash talking. There has to be inherent drama. And this one, featuring America’s Team versus the defending champs, the sophisticated oil barons versus the Imp-and-Iron (a Pittsburgh staple—it’s a shot of Imperial whiskey chased down by an Iron City beer) steelworkers, checked all the boxes. And the trash being spewed was especially inspiring.
“We took it personally that they were called America’s Team,” Mel Blount told NFL Films. “Who granted them that?”
Again the team being bigger than the game.
It was about proving whose way was better.
On the game’s opening kickoff, the Steelers kicker lofted the ball to Preston Pearson, the former Steeler who had signed with the Cowboys during the off-season. Pearson cradled it and then, using the trickery the Steelers so despised, handed the ball off to Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson, the Cowboys first-round pick that year as a linebacker. At Henderson’s first press conference, reporters made the mistake of calling him Tom several times. Henderson stopped the session and said, “My name is Thomas. If my sister has a daughter, I don’t want her growing up to call me Uncle Tom.”
he was split out wide on punt coverages. And he was the only linebacker in the league running the reverse on a kickoff. Which is how he scampered forty-eight yards, then a Super Bowl record, before being tackled by Gerela at the Steelers’ forty-four. Poor Gerela. On the play he injured his rib cage, which, along with his lack of quality practice time, affected him for the rest of the day. The Cowboys stalled, but on the next drive, following a blocked Steeler punt, Staubach connected with Drew Pearson on a twenty-nine-yard pass for the game’s first score. Standing on the sidelines, Bradshaw
...more
Bradshaw, as he had been the Super Bowl before, as he had been during his entire career up to this point, was pestered with questions about his intelligence. No one made note of the fact that he called his own plays, while Navy genius Staubach only followed Landry’s orders. This game, this play, being better than Staubach when it mattered most, meant something to him.
But what lingered were Chuck Noll’s comments after the game. “You have a criminal element in all aspects of society. Apparently we have it in the NFL, too. Maybe we have a law-and-order problem.” For his hit, Atkinson was fined $1,500. For his reaction to the hit, Noll was fined $1,000.
Noll gets caught up in the player hype.
Mass cards from steelworkers in Clairton, Braddock, Homestead, the South Side, Aliquippa, Ambridge, and Chicago were stacked by the open casket.
The importance of community.
Whenever he was asked where he came from, Rooney would proudly say, “My mother’s people were all coal miners and my father’s people were all steelworkers.” He liked to talk to the guys in the hard hats singing “Here we go Steelers, here we go!” at home games. Rooney read the paper. He knew how dire the straits were for the rank and file.
AT PITTSBURGH’S 1977 DAPPER DAN BANQUET, AN ANNUAL celebration of the best of the previous sports year, Tony Dorsett was named the top football player in the state of Pennsylvania.
Outsized player.
Gil Brandt conferred with Tex Schramm and Tom Landry. They gave Seattle their number-one pick (the twenty-fourth overall) and their three second-round picks in exchange for Seattle’s first-rounder. On May 3, 1977, Tony Dorsett was drafted by the Dallas Cowboys. After making a statement to reporters, “We realized we were never going to win the big games without a great tailback. Finally, now, all of the pieces are really set in place. We’re going ahead and booking our rooms for the Super Bowl,” said Brandt.
But Wesley Dorsett refused to leave the mill. He was proud of his son, but he would not have him put food on his table. He continued the daily trek to one of J&L’s basic-oxygen furnaces, donned his green asbestos pants and jacket, and weathered the heat from tap after tap of 3,000-degree steel.
He also announced that he would prefer that people pronounce his last name “Dor-SETT,” rather than the Pittsburgh pronunciation, “DOR-sitt.” “The name is French, and I liked the sound of it that way. It wasn’t as if I had changed my name to some exotic African name. I just wanted it pronounced the way I liked it pronounced,” said Dorsett.
All before a single play. He might have not fit very well with the Pittsburgh philosophy.
Dorsett continued to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Whenever a fight broke out around town,” he once said, “it seemed that I happened to wind up in the middle of it all.” Tex Schramm called him into his office for a talk. But to little avail. When asked about Dorsett’s troubles, quarterback Roger Staubach recalled that “being an outspoken black man in Dallas wasn’t easy then. If he had been white, perhaps a lot of what happened would have been overlooked.”
Every player was so intent on making sure his individual performance satisfied the computer that there was little chance of guys joining together and being better than the sum of their parts. The Cowboys were sterile. The one exception was the receiver coach, former Cowboys tight end Mike Ditka. “In a game in Pittsburgh, one of our receivers was bumped out on the sidelines,” said Dorsett. “One of the Steelers piled on with a late hit. Although a flag was thrown and Pittsburgh was penalized, it didn’t calm Mike Ditka down much. He picked up the football and fired it at the head of the guy who
...more
This gave Landry an excuse to bench the hard-working Preston Pearson.
It showed the Cowboys that when the rest of the team was not playing particularly well, we could still win
